🙏 Kindred Ventures Thank you for helping us co-host last week's Agentic Commerce (un)Conference. The space, planning, and conversations were fantastic. 🦆 🤖
Last week we co-hosted the Agentic Commerce (un)Conference with Basis Theory: an evening designed as an open dialogue working session on what breaks and what works when agents become the buyer instead of the browser. Agents are increasingly likely to touch most transactions in the year ahead. The hard part is making that future safe, observable, and economically viable. Across all breakout discussions one pattern kept surfacing: agents are formally delegates, but practically they’re starting to behave like buyers. They spawn sub‑agents, open accounts, route funds, and sometimes push all the way through checkout, which forces uncomfortable questions about reliability, intent drift, and who really owns the risk when a bot goes off‑script. Trust and identity underpinned every conversation. Agent identity is quickly evolving from a mere passport to an authorization graph. Who spawned what, with which tools, under which policy? Folks explored ideas like “credit scores for agents,” evidence protocols that hash the full transaction lifecycle, and an “Okta for agents”‑style control plane to enforce delegated authority, spend caps, and approval thresholds with something stronger than vibes. The room largely agreed we’re still in a “human in the loop” phase: agents orchestrate workflows, humans approve above thresholds, and truly autonomous agent‑to‑agent flows are a couple of years out. Instead of asking “who owns the risk?”, the more useful question became “how do we compress risk enough that every party can say yes?” If merchants can trade low‑single‑digit exposure for meaningful margin upside, and networks can pre‑define remediation paths, agentic commerce starts to look like a new kind of card program rather than an unbounded science project. The biggest takeaway was about where value accrues. Most people expect agents to touch nearly every transaction within a few years – initiating or at least shaping the flow. But the emerging consensus was this: the biggest upside lies less in the underlying rails and more in the products that own discovery, negotiation, and orchestration. The agents that understand products, policies, and people well enough to turn “please handle this for me” into something both delightful and economically rational. Huge thank you to our co-hosts Colin Luce & James Armstead at Basis Theory and our session leaders and speakers for joining us and participating in this important conversation: Tanner Riche (Visa), Ash Tutika (Mastercard), Alec V. (Adyen), Brendan Ryan (Tempo), Dasmer S. (Allowance (YC P26), Ilan Zerbib (Sapiom), Cole Dermott (Locus), and Eric Zhang (Sponge (YC W26).
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